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Review

Given that Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes turns the great
sleuth (Robert Downey Jr.) and his sidekick, Dr. Watson (Jude Law),
into the boxing and martial-arts champions of London, the movie is
surprisingly bearable. It’s overlong and skitters around for a good 45
minutes before a plot kicks in, but Ritchie adds fillips of style to
the incessant fights—he might have made a good director for the flop The Avengers
picture. Having Holmes battle a villain who might or might not have
supernatural powers actually conjures up the world of Arthur Conan
Doyle, who in real life had too much faith in his five senses, which
made him an easy mark for tricksters.

The
only reason to see it is Downey: No one in film is more likable when
playing dislikable people. When not on a case, his Holmes is not merely
a depressive but a nasty, dissolute, hollow-eyed slob with a compulsion
to test sedating drugs on his hapless pooch. Law’s drab Watson appears
to be disgusted by him—to the point where the mystery is how he could
have ever become Holmes’s friend, let alone the detective’s Boswell.
But Downey’s boy-king spirit shines through. That spirit isn’t
Holmesian (not much kickboxing in Conan Doyle), but by now we’ve seen
so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief
to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such
thing as too much Downey.
— David Edelstein